Synchronicity, I Ching, and my PureBasic journey

Applications, Games, Tools, User libs and useful stuff coded in PureBasic
batngat
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Synchronicity, I Ching, and my PureBasic journey

Post by batngat »

"Synchronicity" is a term coined by a Swiss psychiatrist , Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) , to denote unusual concurrent events which are remarkably relevant to one another without any apparent logical connection . Jung spent years investigating synchronicity in the areas of astrology, dreams and most interestingly, in the Chinese tradition of I Ching .

I Ching , (the Book of Change), is an ancient and cryptic manual which performs an important role in Chinese culture and history . About 30 years ago , I began to explore the I Ching after reading some of Jung's books . I was very intrigued by Jung's fascination with the I Ching , and wished to know what is it that caused a famous Western-European doctor to invest a significant portion of his life researching and speculating .

Since the I Ching revolves around a system of binary logic, I wrote a computer program to assist my exploration . This software was coded using QuickBasic, running on MS-DOS (the ubiquitous personal computing platform in the 1990's) . Initially the program's user interface was done in English . For many years afterwards, I had wished to produce another version which presents a user interface in Vietnamese , (my native tongue), but unable to do so as MS-DOS offered very little Unicode support for Asian languages at the time .


Fast-forward to the year 2014, by then I've discovered PureBasic and realised it was just the tool that I needed .
While reading through the PureBasic instruction manual, the following example captured my attention:

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Looking at this example's picture, I recognised it as having the form of an I Ching trigram (a set of 1 broken and 2 whole lines) . It occurred to me that by simply adding three more items to the menu bar, I would have a very germane "hexagram design" for my new project, something like this :

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After several weeks of concentrated effort, my E-KING program was ready for a road test . I focused on hexagram 9 (entitled "Small Capacity") , and purposedly selected it for a first trial since this hexagram has the same layout as my intended software menu . My program displayed the correct I Ching commentary text for hexagram 9, but failed in its attempt to paint the hexagram form . It kept showing this instead:

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which is hexagram 14 (GREAT POSSESSION) .


Evidently my inexperience in coding had introduced a software bug which lifted the desired figure for hexagram 9 up by one line . The error was fixed, but it pointed out to me that there is no particular reason to stick to the form of hexagram 9 . In fact, why not consult the I Ching for a most auspicious symbol for my new program, I asked myself.

Using my trusted coins I seeked the most appropriate answer. The resulting coin throw was this set : 1 3 3 1 2 3
And the corresponding hexagram is, (surprise .. surprise !), 14 , (Great Possession):

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Of all the 64 possible I Ching hexagrams, the random response just had to be number 14. (It seems that my software was firmly , and greatly, possessed..)
In my mind eyes, Dr Carl Jung appeared to grin from ear to ear . His synchronicity idea has been emphatically vindicated on this occasion .
For me this was an interesting personal experience of synchronicity, and in that sense, truly a great possession !

My E-KING program (written in PureBasic) for Windows-based computers has gone through many revisions since 2014. Around 2019, I have two fully working versions of this software, one in Vietnamese and one in English, looking like this:

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Over the years I continued to learn about PureBasic , and about I Ching, and kept refining my software whenever I could find the time:

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The latest versions (EKING v4.5) can be downloaded from here:

https://github.com/batngat-bn/batngat-b ... en-v45.zip

https://github.com/batngat-bn/batngat-b ... VN-v45.zip


I am not at all a professional software developer, and only learn PureBasic programming as a hobby . The more I use it, the more I am impressed by its powerful features. My contribution of this post is a way to express my appreciation and thanks to the creators of this wonderful software tool .

:)